7-minutes read | December 15, 2021
Summary
As MuleSoft has continued to release new functionality and strengthen their existing suite of offerings, even after 4+ years, many companies have yet to make the move from MuleSoft 3 to MuleSoft 4. By migrating, companies can take full advantage of the increased offerings and better continued support for the platform. In this article we’ll dive into the benefits, risks, and provide some insights as to what’s the fastest and least risky way to migrate.
Benefits of MuleSoft 4.x
While there are many benefits in upgrading to MuleSoft 4, performance, new capabilities, and improved API management / maintenance are the most salient.
Improved performance:
Introduction of Dataweave 2.0 has brought a significantly more efficient transform language and enabled faster development through support for pre-built and optimized libraries
Upgrades to the Object Store v2 enabling more efficient caching - e.g., cross runtime to allow for significantly higher “re-hit” rates
Better parallel processing which has an exponential improvement on throughput / performance as business complexity grows
Core runtime improvements - e.g., self tuning runtime engine and better thread management (especially in 4.3.x +)
Capabilities for the future:
Support for streaming and other means of handling large data sets
Large set of OOTB (Out Of The Box) connectors enabling optimized, native support for 200+ backends / apps
Support for “Private Cloud” deployments, enabling highly regulated clients with data privacy restrictions to still achieve the benefits of a Cloud first strategy
Delivery, support, and maintainability
Improved API Management e.g., fine grained configuration control for policy configuration and support for native OAS (OpenAPI 3.0) API design
Simplified MuleSoft development e.g., through improved data enrichment capabilities at the connector level and a simplified messaging model
Unit Test Framework enhancements (MUnits) to enable more comprehensive coverage and “shift-left” testing
Improvements to build validation - e.g., moving error handling that would otherwise not be identified until functional testing to “build-time”
Standardized dependency management (Maven based) results in a simplified deployment experience and decreases maintenance spend
Increased backwards compatibility allows companies to benefit from ever improving functionality and security without all the associated cost
Future Proofing Your Investment
Given you have already invested in MuleSoft 3.x, it’s clear that ensuring stability and performance is important for your company’s longevity, stability and growth.
Digital Services (APIs as a Service) and the ability to ingest, expose, and derive insights from increasingly large data sets has been steadily increasing as more and more devices generate massive amounts of data. Building a good foundation of well designed and performant APIs will enable future use cases, automations, and spending more resources on generating revenue not support. Examples include Chat Bot automations, ingesting data from IoT devices such as wearables, and providing insights/analytics as a “billable” service.
An API-first integration strategy is at the core of many digital transformations and without upgrading, companies won’t be able to as easily fulfill the expectations of their internal and external customers.
Migration Risks
Many enterprises making the move, view the migration as a true technical “lift and shift” instead of understanding how to optimize their code for the new capabilities in MuleSoft 4 and re-examining opportunities for simplifying the architecture.
Underestimating the development / testing required. MuleSoft 4 is a fairly significant upgrade and requires technology teams to learn more about it’s capabilities. These include:
A fundamental change to the core runtime processing between MuleSoft 3 and MuleSoft 4 and is important to fully retest (performance, load, and functional) especially when a connector or integration approach changed
MuleSoft 4 is not directly backwards compatible with MuleSoft 3. While MuleSoft did provide the Mule Migration Assistant1 it should be seen as a tool to accelerate the process and not a tool to use too casually. In addition, MMA provides support for core connector / component changes, but not everything.
Ingredients for Success
To upgrade with more ease and benefits we suggest the following:
Focus on re-designing for re-use and enabling the business. The migration to MuleSoft 4 should be viewed as an opportunity to refactor and drive new capabilities and solve for modern requirements.
Have a consolidated enterprise migration approach and enable teams to drive and implement standards - e.g., through an integration Center for Enablement (C4E)
Identify monoliths and break down solutions into reusable components, but be careful to not “over-granularize”
Align / rationalize integration tooling and costs:
The value of MuleSoft is best achieved when committing to the platform, especially if coming from the MuleSoft 3 Community version. However, if the enterprise size / licensing model can not be rationalized, identify tooling that can be consistently leveraged for key functionality - e.g., if experience APIs are not cost effective to write in MuleSoft, then identify an alternative API gateway, but still ensure all API specs are maintained in a single place.
Be careful about compromising - e.g. we’ve seen clients over cut corners that save vCore usage/utilization and end up costing more due to the architecture compromises required
Consider using MuleSoft along with other, purpose-built tools. MuleSoft is a very powerful integration tool. However, it may be overpowered and expensive when doing simple tasks, like protocol/format translations and simple data mapping, e.g., functions typically done in an API Gateway.
Upgrade Yourself - MuleSoft 4 isn’t MuleSoft 3 and training / certifications are available for development, architecture, and solution design.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Don’t wait to have all the answers, architectures, designs, coding standards and best practices complete to get started. With MuleSoft, you often learn the most when you deploy your API’s to production. Start earlier, fail fast, and iteratively improve.
Happy to Help / Discuss Further
We have done these types of migrations for clients. If you’d like to discuss and hear more about our experience in this area, please reach out to one of us below.
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